SOURCE: “Julian Barnes (1946-),” in British Writers, edited by George Stade and Carol Howard, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997, pp. 65–76.

In the following essay, Birkerts provides an overview of Barnes's career and major works.

Julian Barnes once remarked—or, better, proclaimed—that “in order to write, you have to convince yourself that it's a new departure not only for you but for the entire history of the novel” (quoted in Stout, p. 68). This is a young man's take-on-all-comers kind of statement, and one that Barnes may have regretted making as soon as the reporter packed up her notebook and left; it tells us, however, that the writer not only harbors a great ambition but also sustains a commitment to literary seriousness that is uncommon at the end of the twentieth century.

Few writers even think in terms of history and departures from it—these are modernist, not post-modernist, preoccupations. Which...